Astronomers Discover Mysterious Milky Way Object That Emits Radio Waves, X-rays

An international team of astronomers including a UMD researcher discovered a new cosmic phenomenon in the Milky Way: an object about 15,000 light-years from Earth that emits pulses of radio waves and X-rays for two minutes every 44 minutes.

The study, led by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and published in the journal Nature, documents the first time an object belonging to a recently discovered astronomical class called long-period radio transients (LPTs) has been detected in X-rays.

ICRAR researchers first detected LPTs—objects that periodically emit radio pulses minutes or hours apart—in 2022. Ten LPTs have been discovered since then, but until now they have only been detected in radio waves, which are much lower energy than X-rays.

Researchers found this latest mysterious object, dubbed ASKAP J1832-0911, while using ASKAP, a radio telescope owned by Australia’s national science agency. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory happened to be observing the same swath of sky at the same time, revealing that the radio signals and X-ray pulses were emanating from a single source.

“Discovering that ASKAP J1832-0911 was emitting X-rays felt like finding a needle in a haystack,” said the study’s lead author, Ziteng “Andy” Wang from Curtin University and the ICRAR.

Study co-author Zorawar Wadiasingh, a NASA research scientist and visiting assistant research scientist in UMD’s Department of Astronomy, said the advent of new telescope technologies enabled this exceptional find.

“These objects, which are apparently common and extremely bright in the radio spectrum, could have been found 40 or 50 years ago if someone knew where to look, but only now do we have radio telescopes with the kind of software and computational techniques to really look for them,” he said. “Even now, the X-ray discovery is an extremely lucky event.”

While the pulses emanating from ASKAP J1832-0911 are characteristic of an LPT, it remains unknown exactly what the object is.

This article was adapted from text provided by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.